A professional hockey player falls headfirst into fanfiction-and ends up shipping himself with his captain-in this addictive friends-to-fanfiction-to-lovers romance.
When NHL star forward Will Burns gets sent a fic about him and his best friend (and team captain), he laughs it off. It's a joke. It has to be. But one late-night scroll turns into another…and another-and suddenly Will's a little too invested.
Because the fic gets a few things right.
Like how good Théo looks in the locker room. How steady he is under pressure. How he's always been Will's person, on and off the ice. And the more Will reads, the harder it is to ignore the truth: maybe he's not as straight as he thought. Maybe he never was. And maybe what he feels for Théo has never been just friendship.
So Will does what any normal person would do: he dives deeper. He tears through every fic he can find-then starts writing his own. Somewhere between late-night updates and comment threads, he strikes up a flirtatious back-and-forth with Étienne, his favorite Will/Théo author on AO3.
But when a line in Étienne's latest fic mirrors a private moment Will knows only he and Théo shared, the fantasy stops feeling so fictional. And Will is forced to make a choice: keep everything exactly as it is-safe, controlled, and unspoken-or risk his career, his friendship, and his heart for the one thing he wants most.
Autorentext
Jenny Linsky is one of the most popular Men's Hockey RPF writers on Archive of Our Own, with over two million words and twice the page views of the next most popular writer. She has built a devoted following across AO3 and Tumblr and inspired four-figure bidding wars in fandom nonprofit organizations' auctions. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and two-year-old daughter and works in Business Intelligence at Harvard. When she's not working or chasing after her toddler, she runs a living room theater troupe, co-hosts a novel analysis podcast, and draws on her own queer identity to write stories full of yearning, self-discovery, and hard-won happily-ever-afters.